Who Really Wrote the USS Indianapolis Speech in Jaws?
Updated: Jul 30
Four minutes into a quiet night on the Orca, Quint stops joking around and tells Brody and Hooper about the worst thing that ever happened to him. The USS Indianapolis monologue in Jaws is often called the best scene in the film, and it's based on a real disaster. What's less settled, even fifty years later, is who actually wrote it.
The Writer Nobody Credited
Most retellings of this story start with John Milius. The real starting point is Howard Sackler, a Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright best known for The Great White Hope, who Spielberg brought on to quietly rework the Jaws script before filming even began. Sackler never asked for a writing credit and rarely gets one in retellings of this story, but according to Spielberg himself, he's the one who suggested Quint needed a backstory in the first place. Sackler pitched the Indianapolis incident specifically because Quint needed something in his past that explained “what made him the way he is,” and once Spielberg heard the story, he knew it belonged in the film. Sackler's own draft of the speech ran to about three-quarters of a page.
Milius Takes a Crack at It
Spielberg then showed the script to his friend John Milius, who asked if he could take a pass at the speech himself. What came back was a ten-page monologue, wildly too long for the film but, by Spielberg's account, the closest thing to what audiences eventually heard. Some Jaws researchers have pointed to a possible source for Milius's version: a 1961 book called Shark! Killer of the Sea by Thomas Helm, which told a similar account of sailors adrift and under attack after a shipwreck, and which co-screenwriter Carl Gottlieb has said Milius may have drawn on for the speech's structure.
Shaw's Rewrite at the Dinner Table
Robert Shaw was a genuine writer in his own right, with the stage play The Man in the Glass Booth to his name, and it was Shaw who took Milius's ten pages and cut them down. Carl Gottlieb, who was also working on the script at the time, said there were as many as ten different drafts of the speech floating around by that point, including one he'd written himself. Shaw read through all of them privately, then showed up to dinner with the cast one night holding a stack of paper.
According to Gottlieb, Shaw had taken it all, synthesized it, and performed his version for the table on the spot. Everyone was won over, and Spielberg decided that was the one they'd shoot. Gottlieb has been fairly blunt in interviews that he considers the speech Shaw's work above anyone else's, and has suggested Milius gets more credit than he deserves largely because of his friendship with Spielberg.
A Difficult Shoot
Actually filming the monologue took two attempts. Shaw reportedly asked Spielberg for permission to have a few drinks beforehand, arguing it would help him get into the headspace of a man who'd survived something horrific, and Spielberg agreed. It didn't go well. Shaw ended up too intoxicated to get through a single take, and the day's filming was scrapped entirely. He returned the next morning mortified, with no memory of what had happened, and asked Spielberg directly whether he'd embarrassed himself. Spielberg gave him another shot. Sober and fully prepared, Shaw reportedly finished the whole speech in about four takes, and it's that version that made it into the finished film.
How Accurate Is the Speech, Really?
The broad strokes of Quint's story are true. The Indianapolis really did deliver components for the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima, really was torpedoed by a Japanese submarine days later, and its survivors really did spend days in open water facing shark attacks before rescue arrived. You can read the full history of what actually happened in our in-depth piece on the USS Indianapolis, but a few details in Quint's version don't line up with the record. He gives the date as June 29, when the ship was actually torpedoed just after midnight on July 30. He also says 1,100 men went into the water, when the real number was closer to 880.
Quint's sharks are described as tiger sharks, while survivors and historians have generally pointed to oceanic whitetips as the species most responsible for the attacks. One thing the movie didn't do, despite a common assumption, is reveal a secret the Navy had buried. The sinking, the court-martial and the survivors' ordeal had all been public knowledge since 1945, Jaws just introduced that history to an audience who'd mostly never heard it before.
How much it landed with audiences is easy to underestimate now. Peter Benchley later recalled that his own housekeeper had to call in sick the day after seeing the film, because watching Quint's monologue was how she finally learned the details of how her son had actually died aboard the Indianapolis. Fifty years on, that's still what the scene does better than almost anything else in the film: it takes a piece of real history most people had never heard of and makes sure they never forget it.
